“Donald Trump says that if he becomes president, he will ‘get Apple to start making their computers and their iPhones on our land, not in China,'” Konstantin Kakaes writes for MIT Technology Review. “Bernie ­Sanders has also called for Apple to manufacture some devices in the U.S. instead of China.”

“Neither candidate could instantly make that happen,” Kakaes writes. “As Steve Jobs once told President Obama when he asked why Apple didn’t make phones in its home country, the company didn’t hire manufacturers in China only because labor is cheaper there. China also offered a skilled workforce and flexible factories and parts suppliers that can, Apple believes, retool more quickly than their American counterparts.”

“But set that aside for now, and imagine that Apple persuaded one of its Chinese manufacturers to open factories in the United States or did that itself. Could it work? Apple could profitably produce iPhones in America, as some high-end Mac computers are produced, without making them much more expensive,” Kakaes writes. “There’s a catch, though, that undermines Trump’s and Sanders’s arguments.”

MacDailyNews Take: The U.S. doesn’t want those kinds of subsistence-level (or worse) assembly jobs. Today, in a global economy, where great wage disparities exist, those type of jobs generally cost more than they are worth as they simply don’t pay enough to allow people to live independently. They’ll soon be replaced by robots anyway. You want the types of high-paying jobs that Apple has already proven to have created in droves.

They don’t sleep, they don’t strike or make demands, they don’t jump off buildings or die in dust fires, most of them don’t even need the lights on. They just make what you program them to make, the same way every time, with quality control that no human line can ever match.

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13 Comments

The suicides at Foxconn were incredibly overblown, considering they have roughly a million employees. For one thing, the suicide rate at Foxconn at its peak was lower than for China as a whole; the suicide rate for American college students is four times higher.

And something the media almost NEVER mentions: some of these workers killed themselves to make money for their families. For a while, families of suicide victims received relatively healthy “compensation” for their losses.

No one is saying working on an assembly line is fun or fulfilling. But Foxconn is no better, no worse than a lot of factories around the world. Just bigger.

First thing I did when I heard about these “mass suicides” is find out how many people worked for Foxconn and then find out what the average number is for a population of that size. Sure enough, the number of suicides was about the same number for any group of 1 million people.,

If we keep trying real hard, we can probably get Apple to move their headquarters to Singapore or similar location. America is not the biggest market in the world. Trump went bankrupt four times. The fifth time will be the US treasury if he gets elected. I am getting real tired of politicians who have business advice for Apple. One might get confused and think the US government has a good balance sheet.

Politicians need to simplify the tax codes, reduce corporation taxes and also execute the cash hoarding in overseas so corporation can repatriate their frozen, dust-collected money home.
By the way, back then we want Apple make more intelligent iPhone with a flying cars, printed money, gourmet dinners, etc on this forum of MDN, we mention about the flying cars, today Google co-founder Page backing two start-ups making flying cars: Bloomberg Shall we ask Google for loyalty?.